AccuRig: easy auto-rigging (better than Mixamo?)

in this video we'll be talking about accurig this is a new stand-alone auto-rigging software for humanoid characters it is part of the octa-core family of products there are other software like character creator or iclone for animation are paid software but accurate is completely free and of course accurate is made so that it easily connects to character creator but it is also possible to export fbx and import the rigged character into other software such as blender maya game engines and so on in this video i'm going to show you how to rig a character with iq rig and then bring it into blender and convert the automatic rig to a rigidify rig accurig is an offline software so you'll need to download it just go to this page which i'll share with you and click free download and while you're downloading stuff you can also go to the cc character creator blender tools i'm going to share this link with you and then you can just go to releases and click on the latest release and download the source code as a zip file and that will download a file called something like ccblendertools.zip and that is the blender add-on that will help us convert the result from the accurig to blender's rigify okay once accurate is downloaded you just need to install it and once it is installed just start the software and you should see something like this it will ask you to log in or create an account so i'm going to sign in with google and once you're signed in you'll be able to use all of the features of this software if you're not registered you won't be able to use the export features so before i show you how to use a custom character i can very quickly demonstrate what the software does by using one of these sample files if i just go to file load sample character and choose one of these objs i'll just go with peat okay the first step is to set the symmetry of the character so these sample files are very well optimized so they should work almost without any input from the user so just click this rig body button and that will take a minute once it's done you'll see these dots which represent different articulation points of the character and so with this sample model i don't need to do much i'll just click this button again which now says rig the right hand and again it will do some calculations basically analyzing the model and finding where the fingers are and once it's done you'll have these dots over the fingers and again here i'm going to assume that it's mostly correct this looks really bad so i'm just going to move it a little bit more on that later and then i'm going to click the green button again to move to the next section which is reading the other hand and then i'll just finalize the character so again this process will take a minute or two i'll come back when it's done okay and once it's done you'll see the character in the viewport and you'll see that it already has some sort of animation applied to it it looks quite good and that's cool but our goal here is not to rig a sample character you're probably going to want to rig your specific character so if i go back to the load character screen you'll see that the software gives you some information about the types of characters that work well with the software and you'll see that they recommend a t-pose an a-pose or even a relaxed a pose they tell you that you can have additional meshes which however from my tests does not work perfectly and you can even have unusual meshes on their website they have this example of a woman hugging a child and even that can be rigged with this software but i'm not going to go that far i want to try to rig something that is kind of challenging but still within the established standards for you know game or movie characters so i got this model from sketchfab and i like it because it's very complex there is some complex clothing on it there are props there is a hair mesh but it is fairly symmetrical and in a standard apos if we look at this screen again here it kind of says that we should be able to rig characters with props holding props but i wouldn't recommend that i tried it and if the character is holding something it always kind of ends up bending and not being completely rigid as a prop should be so if you want to add props i recommend that you add them afterwards in blender but yeah now i can export this character as an fbx file so i'm going to go to file export fbx and because i want to export everything in the scene i don't need to change any of the export options i can just press export fbx and then i'll go back to akirig get my fbx and just drag and drop it into this screen and the process will start okay because the character is symmetrical akirik was able to detect the symmetry so i can move to the next step which is reading the body accurate is analyzing the model and placing the articulation points automatically and it does a pretty good job but for custom characters you would always want to at least check the markers and make sure that they're placed correctly so here on the right you'll see a screen which kind of shows you where the markers should go and what is really cool is if you hover over some of these markers the image will change and it will contain more information as to where this particular marker that you have selected should go so now if i just click and drag this marker i can move it around and place it somewhere according to this image that i have and since i have a symmetrical character there is a symmetry option that i want to use so i'm going to enable it and then move the marker again and the one on the other side will move simultaneously and that will save me some time so we have this marker here which should go somewhere below the navel so it's looking good uh here is something that i feel is missing from the software i can kind of move this marker this center marker anywhere i want which is good for non-symmetrical characters but for this character for example i would really like it if this marker was always in the center but anyway so here are the knees and you may want to look from the side view to align the knees and here is another feature request for me i would really like to be able to switch to side view and front view and so on so maybe in the future version we'll get this here is something important that you need to know by default you have this midpoint placement enabled and that will place the marker inside the volume of the geometry from the current camera view so now if i move this marker like this and then look from the front view you'll see that it actually was moved in the center and here's another feature request i would like an undo function right now we don't have one but anyway now i have to kind of manually move it back into place and now to avoid this problem you can either disable midpoint placement which will make the movement completely freeform or you can enable front part so it will only take into account the leg that i can see and not the one behind it with these settings i can also align the angles and the feet or the tools now according to the diagram i should probably move this a little bit higher and this one also from the side view it should be right beneath the um ear so here's probably the hardest part to align and that is the clavicle but again this graph gives us a really nice information about these points so i would align it personally something like this here is the elbow uh you may want to look from this back view and place it exactly where the elbow is and then zoom in on the wrist and kind of align this point with the wrist and with that my points are kind of looking okay i forgot to tell you how to navigate in the viewport it is fairly intuitive left click to rotate the view right click to pan and mouse wheel to zoom you can also switch the modes so you can switch to pan mode and then left click will pan the view or zoom mode and then you'll be able to zoom in and out with just left click so using these gizmos you can navigate the viewport with just left click and the last button here will reset the view to the front view okay i'm ready to move on to rigging the hands so i'll press the green button again and let accurate calculate the fingers all right and once it's done it's going to zoom in onto the hand and you'll see that the points for each finger already look well aligned so i'm going to go ahead and manually move these points just to make sure that they're exactly in the correct positions but before that let's take a look at the number of fingers right now we have five fingers which is suitable for a realistic human but if you click here you'll be able to rig zero fingers so you can just keep the fingers let's actually click and see what happens you'll see that this diagram now says no fingers and you can continue with the process or if you have a special creature or a cartoony character you can choose three fingers for example and what is cool is that this diagram also changes to show you exactly the placement of the fingers that you need okay so these are the three fingers which doesn't match my character so i'll switch back to five fingers which is what i need in this case okay and now i'm going to take a good look at the points and i'm going to tweak them slightly just to make sure that they're placed correctly so again if you point to one of the markers it will be highlighted in the diagram to the right and also all markers of the same finger will be highlighted and that is very useful because if one of these points is off you may not be sure which finger it belongs to but because they all get highlighted it is easy to figure out which point belongs to which finger so i'm going to move it back at the knuckle and here is another feature request that i have i would really like to see the wireframe of this object that would help me with placing these markers but it is not possible at this point so i'm going to do my best and place these markers over the respective knuckles in the finger so make sure to move the view around and just check if everything is placed correctly the thumb deserves special attention again pay attention to the diagram which tells you where to place the markers and this gizmo here deserves special attention it has to be aligned to be perpendicular to the fingernail of the thumb here we don't really have a clear nail but i know that it is right here so this alignment is looking good if you need to you can use this gizmo to rotate this control around and with that we are done with the right hand and we can move to the left hand so i can just click here on the left hand or i can press the green button again it doesn't matter so we just align the right hand and this character is symmetrical so here we have a tool which will allow us to mirror the markers that we align for the right hand to the left hand and you have to be very careful so the first button if you hover over it it will say mirror to right hand and the second one says mirror to left hand so that is the one that we want we want to mirror the right hand to the left hand if i press it you'll see that the markers will move and they will be aligned correctly so with that the setup is done and i can finalize the character and that again will take a minute or two and once it's done you'll see your character with an applied animation and that should tell you if the setup worked or not so you can test different poses if we test the t-pose you'll see that the automatic weighting is not perfect this is something that i would definitely try to fix manually but here we have more test animations so this is a pretty extreme test animation and you'll see that our character is working quite well here on their hands you can press this um pose which creates a fist and you'll see that accurate did a pretty good job this is a decent looking fist there are other hand and finger animations that you can test you can make the character walk and so one of the problematic areas is the shoulder and it's not looking too bad but if you find that the shoulders are sloping too low or they're too high then you can go back to the rig setup so at any point you can still change the hand rig and the body rig so i'll go back to the body rig and just slightly tweak these markers on the shoulder and then i'll go to check animation again which will do the rigging and waiting part again so again we'll have to wait a minute or two so it's done and you'll see that the position and the shape of the shoulders definitely did change i kind of like this one but if i didn't i can go back to the body rig and change it again as many times as i want so now we have this character it is rigged within accurate but what do we do with it right because accurate is part of the acta-core family of products one of the simplest things that you can do is to upload this new character to the octa-core system here we have this upload to octa-core button if you just press it and wait a couple of seconds it will be exported to octa-core and here i can press view actor on octa-core because i'm logged in with my octa-core account in accurig this automatically brought this new character into the octa-core system and so now what you can do is click on motion for example and apply one of 1700 actions that are in the octa-core library most of them are not free but some are so so you can definitely test the system so let's apply this dance to our character and there he goes okay so now what do we do if you want to use this character in blender i can simply click the download button here choose my character here press next and then in these settings make sure that my target application is blender and for fps i personally use 30 but you can do whatever you like and then you can download however if you do this this way your character will be set in a t pose instead of its original apos that we had so if that's what you want you can go ahead and download it like this and maybe there are some special settings inside this octa-core software that you can tweak and you can maybe download it in the original a post i'm just not able to figure it out i'm not very familiar with this software so what i'm going to do is go back to the aki rig and click on export in here i can export an fbx or usd or i can save as i avatar if i want to use the other octa-core soft software but i'm going to export fbx set it up for blender and i'm going to talk about textures in a second for now i'll just leave this to default and export so i'm going to export this is accurate down go back to blender and now i can go to file import fbx and just import this um apx that i just exported and that's going to work um i'm going to have my character but here i want to talk about using the special add-on that octa-core gives us to convert this character to a rigidify character so i'm going to undo and go to edit preferences click on install and i'm going to install the blender tools software that i downloaded earlier and just activate it when i activate it i'm going to get these two additional tabs in my end panel and the one i want is the cc pipeline so here i'm going to focus on the import export options and i'm going to import a character so again i can navigate to my fbx file and import it it looks similar to the regular fbx import but here the add-on does something special here's a character again it looks the same but what is different is that now i can go to rigging and animation and i'll be able to convert it to rigidify if i just use the regular fbx import this rigidify button would be grayed out so here you can have a quick setup or advanced the advanced will allow you to set up a face rig but here it tells me that this character doesn't have a face rig so for now accurate does not do a face rig maybe in the future it will and will be able to convert it to rigidify for now it's not possible so i'll just go to quick and press rigify and just like that my whole character was converted to a riggify rig now if i go to pause mode and move some of the widgets you'll see that the character moves with it so yeah just like that we have a rigidified rig that uses the weights and the bones that we set up in accurate and we can also easily retarget motions from octa-core to this rigid fire rig i'm going to show it to you in a second but first let's take care of the textures if i look at the material preview you'll see that the original character that i had has textures but the one that i exported and then imported back into blender does not have any textures that's okay i'm going to hide all of these meshes for the original character and then all i have to do is select one of the meshes doesn't matter which one let's go to object mode and select this body mesh go to materials and here we have a material called body004.001 so i want to click on this button here and instead of material that says zero one i'm going to choose this one which doesn't have a zero zero one or actually i think in the import export setting something changed and blender changed this dot to an underscore so i'm going to choose this material which has a dot in it okay and my original material was reapplied and i'm going to keep doing this just selecting the right material so that's it now i have my materials back here i think i got something wrong this should be um cloves there we go okay um so that's what i do for the materials basically when you export from blender you can go to file export fbx and in here under path mode you can choose copy and click this button and that will export the textures along with your fbx file it's just that i don't trust this function if you have very complex materials they won't be exported correctly so i prefer to do this manually so once i have this i can actually go to my outliner and select all of these original meshes that i had and just right click and delete them because i have this new mesh which has all of the right materials and it is also rigged so that's the process and finally let's also cover exporting animations from octa-core so here i have this animation i can click on download and then choose export motion only for the character i'm going to choose my own character that will give me the most compatible motion then i'll click next target application blender and fps 230 and then i'll press download the animation will be downloaded as a zip file inside the motion folder is this fbx with the actual action so i'm going to unzip it in here and then back to blender um again go to the cc pipeline rigging and animation and then we have retargeting again instead of using the regular fbx i'm going to click import animations go to my folder and import this motion that i just downloaded okay here's the motion and again i need to select my riggify rig and let's check the name of this um animation that i downloaded i'll go to dope sheet action editor and here it is it has a very complex name so i'm going to rename it to dense motion go back to my riggify rig and here for source armature i want to highlight this one acrobatic dance let's actually rename it source so here i'm going to highlight the source and it looks like that messed things up so let's undo okay so i'm going to delete this and import the animation again okay now without changing any names um i'm going to select this is the source armature and the action is the source action and then i can click on preview retarget and that will add some temporary constraints on the rigified rig based on the animation rig that we just imported and so your character will be able to play this animation but this is not the final animation it is not yet fully baked on the riggify rig before the final bake this add-on gives you some settings for the retargeting which may allow you to improve the poses a little bit so you have a way to bring the arms closer to the body or to make them wider same for the legs you can control the heels and the overall height of the character okay so here i may want to widen the arms just a little bit but overall it's looking good so i'm going to stop the preview and to bake the final animation on the rigify rig i need to click bake retarget i'm going to wait a minute until blender is done baking okay and once it's done um if i go to pause mode you'll see that we actually have keyframes on these controls so the whole action was actually baked on the riggify rig and now you can use it in the nla combine it with other actions and so on anything that you can do with a standard blender animation so i'm about to wrap this video up but before we go accurate did a really fine job on the automatic weighting of this character but if you need to do any custom weight painting you need to unhide layer 29 for rigidify in rigidify it always holds the deformation bones and then should select the character any part of the character that you want to wait paint and then you can go to weight paint mode and then if you just control click any of these bones the weights will be displayed and then you can set your weight painting settings and paint away i have a playlist about weight painting so i'm not going to go into detail here i'm just giving you the basics and so this will be it for this video we covered a full accurate to blender and rigifi workflow we even applied octa-core motion capture data on a rigidify rig and i'm sure that there may be other workflows that you guys may be interested in so rather than trying to guess what you need and making a three-hour long tutorial please let me know what you would like to see and i may cover it whenever i get the same question at least three or so times it's almost guaranteed that i'll make a video about it as always thank you for your support if you like what i do you can consider joining my patrons on gumroad or patreon you can also support us by liking subscribing and commenting and i hope you'll join me in another cg dive video

Channel: CGDive (Blender Rigging Tuts)

Views: 222,880

Keywords: blender3d, b3d, rigging

Id: XsAT3s8nrPE

Length: 27min 44sec (1664 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 08 2022